Contents

Goals

To provide an opportunity for everyone to introduce themselves, and start to get to know a few of their fellow participants

To allow people who have never used IRC a chance to use some basic features and see some features demonstrated

To briefly discuss HFOSS projects

To provide participants with an opportunity to discuss progress on stage 1 activities

We expect that some people in the course will be quite familiar with IRC, others will have only passing familiarity, and some to have no prior experience at all. We ask that everyone participate, whether this is completely new or completely familiar.

The discussion will be informal, but to provide some structure, we will loosely follow this agenda:

Agenda

Introductions - We'll go through the list of attendees and have each person say something about themselves. A sentence or so is fine.

Discussion of IRC basic features - team members or others present can demonstrate a few basic features. Some that might be covered include:

Chat

Just type and press enter to say something

IRC Commands

Commands start with a "/"

/help provides a pointer to command info

/nick to set or change your nickname

/away and /back - To mark yourself as not available or as having returned

/me to indicate that you are performing an action (e.g., /me waves hello)

Type someone's nick in a comment to get their attention IRC clients will typically signal, e.g., by flashing the IRC icon

nick: - beginning your comment with someones nick followed by a colon allows you indicate the person to whom you are directing your comment or whose question you are answering

Questions about IRC - anyone who has questions about IRC can ask them at any point during the IRC

Discussion of HFOSS projects - in the weeks ahead we'll be asking you to select an HFOSS project to investigate and to which you might potentially contribute. We'll use this IRC for a short discussion of the projects, perhaps including a few words about student participation in these projects in the past.

At each of the IRC meetings we'll have several of the POSSE team members to facilitate. We've asked people to sign up for different times to accommodate schedules, but also so that everyone will get to talk some without the conversation getting too confusing.

Please do jump in and try things! More than anything, the goal of this meeting is to learn and have some fun playing with IRC.